Unnamed Collage, ©LeisaHammett.com, 2018
As we approach 2021 with held breath and fingers crossed, I’ve compiled a series of mostly Facebook posts that I wrote between January 2019 and April 2020 and publishing them here. I’ve been wanting to do this for some time. The feedback received was that they resonated with folks. They’re personal history/personal essays on relationships and I feel pretty good about them, too. Yet, they’re fairly personal—nudging myself in that uncomfortable “out there,” oozing with vulnerability. (Who says an Enneagram 8 can’t be vulnerable?)
In reality, I can remember not that long ago—I’m pushed to say how many years—that I feared being so honest in public because it would shatter some kind of pseudo-I-got-mah-shit-togetha persona. Heh. Writing definitely helps me break through that crap and I really began to ooze after I broke open after my last divorce, now a decade ago.
As one of these posts shares, authenticity, telling our truth, putting ourselves out there, (I share the safety precautions I take in doing so,) is healing. I do it for me. But what I’ve learned is that it can have a ripple effect for others’ and their healing, too.
I think I write personal essay genre because I just wanna figure things out. If I can figure them out in my own head and life, well…us writers just gotta write what we know and live. At least this one.
So putting all of these five posts of waxing and waning love, ouch, it feels out on a limb. So, I’m getting it all over and done with in one post. For posterity. Now. Cause I’m wanting to create something new in 2021. (Lots of things new.)
I found that for the last year I had a tendency to apologize for desiring a relationship at my age. I don’t mean that a woman in her late 50s, early 60s or, any damn age, shouldn’t want a companion. I mean that so many of the evolved women I know arrive at this stage and say: “no, thank you.” But I’m not in that camp. I felt reassured the other day by a podcast that reminded me that humans are wired for companionship. I admire and honor those women flying solo at my stage in life. Me, I want to ride shotgun, (and take turns at the wheel, too, of course). 😉
As I told someone recently, I think part of my lessons in this lifetime have been through relationships. (Ouch again.) And, in this last quarter to 30 years of my life (not sure I want to be living in 2050 at age 90 with the oceans choked with plastic—yet intending to keep myself well and living that long is about being there for Grace, my special needs daughter…) I want to get it right. I want to apply what I’ve learned and how I’ve healed into a healthy partnership.
So, if anyone’s out there or not, here’s that series on relationships.
Deep breath. Here goes:
Attachment = Suffering, early January, 2019
image: ©LeisaHammett.com
Becca Ganick, pottery
I spent Sunday suffering. It was of my own creation, this suffering. In a culture where we embrace the concept of victimization, it’s difficult for many to accept responsibility for our own choices. And suffering is a choice—how we choose to perceive our circumstances.
I stand firm in this as I’ve lived it for all of my adult life, from age 24 onward. But particularly in the two decades-plus since my daughter’s diagnosis of autism.
Three years into the autism journey, I became clear: I could choose to live as wholly as possible or I could shrink into a self-created, constricting cocoon of suffering.
I woke up in the middle of the pre-dawn hours of Sunday raging in my thoughts. In the darkness, literal and metaphorical, when the anger settled to a simmer, I knew that beneath it was sadness. It works that way, you know. Sadness lives on the floor beneath anger.
The match that lit the sadness that led to the flames of anger was fueled by the gas of expectation. I’d set myself up. And by setting myself up, I took myself out of present time consciousness.
Just writing this feels like an exfoliation of my emotional insides. I’ve scrubbed off a gunked up residue with a heart-to-my-own-heart honest look at my truth.
The struggle, yesterday, however, did not end with the realization of my own set up for failure with those expectations. (Expectations lead to disappointment. Expectations are a projection into a future that is not yet born.) I created a fantasy based on a lack of IRL. Boom.
I journaled throughout the morning and talked with a wise friend. I wrote a letter. I attempted to work on a small business deadline. Work was not easy wearing lead shoes made of too heavy emotions.
Finally, in a toxic dance with blue light, too late into the night, I googled for something related but unrelated, which produced an article that delivered the secret sauce: Attachment.
I’d become attached to an outcome. That attachment, the Psychology Today author smartly wrote, delivered a healthy dose of suffering.
And with that, those two words: attachment and suffering, I was able to…detach.
We are, after all, what we think. Our thoughts create our life. And I created a Sunday of suffering. Today is the beginning of the week. A new day. I’m putting on a different pair of shoes, and now have a clean slate of thoughts. I’m ready. Hello, Monday.
“Landscape of the Heart” ©LeisaHammett.com, 11. 2019
Landscape of the Heart, early January, 2020
This blurb of a post was a portion in an wordy (surprise-surprise) artist statement that accompanied this collage that exhibited in February through the spring of the pandemic at Centennial Arts Center as a part of Nashville Collage Collective’s show. In explaining the piece: The subconscious mind often creates unknowingly through the hands of the artist as the left brain is shushed. And this piece? Note that’s a blue heart in the left upper corner. It’s a bleeding, broken heart. Note the woman leaving a man in the lower right corner. The development of both of those were pure accidents of the conscious mind, but not of the subconscious mind. This was a piece created in the healing of a unexpected severing of a promising relationship with considerable history. But also note the feathers and the flight. As observed by another artist, this is about “Leisa, the Warrior Woman.” Ascension. And, after all, the artist’s spiritual name is “Songbird.” #ItsTimeToFly
©LeisaHammett.com
The Bittersweetness of Loss, late January, 2020
I’m experiencing a new and interesting phase of my life so far this year. It’s as if a decade of experiences have coalesced as I prepare to step into yet another decade of my life a little less than six months from now. I crashed into my 50s and spent much of the decade doing deeply intensive reparative work to break old, destructive patterns where relationships were concerned.
I shared next to nothing about our breakup here on the Facebook, but, that intense 9-month relationship ended unexpectedly at the end of summer. Not discussing it here was very intentional as well. It felt too personal, too painful, too. raw. And, it’s not me to put out innuendo that could be misinterpreted as passive aggressive, or victim and blame mentality. That’s not how I roll both internally and externally.
I gave myself the time I needed to heal. All four months of the fall.
So, in my chattery brain, which possesses the obsessive genes of autism, I have found myself occasionally recounting where we were in our fast-paced courtship at its start last January—a relationship that springboarded from a 40-year history of knowing one another.
Now I’ve entered a brave new age, for me, of online dating. It’s fascinating and an absolute hoot. I’m investigating and exploring it like the journalist that I was trained to be and was for decades of my career. But, at times leading up to this now, I found myself in momentary victim thinking about that ended relationship: “If only they…I would not be here….” And then, I yanked myself out of it.
Would I want to be back there now?
The answer was and is: “No.”
I would not want to reverse time…I don’t want to erase it, either.
I am who I am today because of the experiences last year. They provided me with such a beautiful foundation to build upon. One of courageous honesty, authenticity, vulnerability and openness in a relationship. Like none I’d experienced before. I knew that the decade’s arduous internal labor had birthed a new model of being in relationship, and for a too brief while, I had someone who could meet me in that. Until they couldn’t.
#revelation #gratitude #InAllThings #Really
©LeisaHammett.com
Exhaling into the Past, February 2020
Perhaps this is a bad idea. But, here goes. When I’ve posted about my past relationships—mostly minimally—my aim has been to speak from the perspective of what I’ve learned and how I grew from the experiences. I have intentionally chosen not to denigrate any person in my past. That’s not my style to conduct myself in public in such manner. I have never been a victim. That, for me, has been about choice. When I learn, when I grow and become more empowered, I am just that. Empowered to learn, grow and move on with greater clarity.
iPhone technology is randomly taunting me. It’s not personal. It happens, I assume, to us all. I opened my photos in search of an image this morning and was greeted by my face from February, 11 years ago, on a trip to Trinidad with my then fiancé. His image was also in the video that Apple so generously (cough) supplied me of the trip. These images had been taken by my Canon dslr, not my iphone, but the technology allowed them to be merged from the bowels of forgotten photo files in my MacBook Air and dumped into my iPhone. Without my intentionally trying….
But, here’s the thing. Just this year, I came to even greater peace, a level of peace, I didn’t even know I was holding out on. And, jarringly, it came to me by way of online dating. Standing at the precipice of 60, this is my first ever foray into this bewildering platform of meeting new people. One of the first men I went out with is in a social group with my ex. I did not know that until the middle of our first date. I nearly suffered a very mild case of PTSD after that date as it had surfaced, by coincidence. He was kind about it, but asked me to detail some of our relationship, which ended—again, rare—with me doing a hard turn and walking away from that marriage, door securely shut, locked and double bolted.
I wrote some in my blog in 2011 about the relationship, again, from the perspective of what I learned about my choices and where they had taken me, plus the key connection to my father’s death and how his dying allowed me to see my patterns of attracting to me his own energy in other men.
I saw the picture this morning of my second husband, H20, (husband 2.0,) as I still refer to him and was able to feel. Nothing. Indeed, I worked diligently with a shaman for five years post divorce from H20, to heal. But until my early January 2020 date reopened that door to look back and talk about that painful past, I learned I had still stored some of my personal oxygen supply behind that door of yesteryear. Finally, I was able to exhale.
The date with that man this year turned into two and was supposed to be three. (But won’t be for reasons purposely undisclosed.) But, I am grateful that he pried open the door of my past so that I could breathe fully into that formative era just the mere start of this past decade. I was able to fully exhale. And then, I breathed deeply into my future.
By the end of this writing, choosing to glance a few times at the image of his handsome, charismatic figure, I got clear on my questions about posting his image. No. How would I feel if the tables were turned? Of course, some people would recognize him. And as much as I still choose to shut down his access to me (for reasons that I’ve purposely not gone into here,) some people would recognize and know him. And, though, I never thought about sharing it to out him in a revengeful way, it all comes back on me and my sense of fairness and integrity.
Once again, I’ve heard in the last week from someone, another man whom I’m dating, who commented on how much I’ve put myself out there on my blog—which mostly curates cob webs these days. (The address is on my personal business card and is easily accessible with a Google search.) Usually, that remark about “putting myself out there” is accompanied by descriptions like brave and courageous, to which I shrug my shoulders, not comprehending how I could be any differently. Here’s the thing. I’m a writer. I view the world through the lense of my art (my writing, my visual art, including my humble little iPhone snaps). Artists are here to give perspective and a unique world view by the fact that our brains are wired differently, our views are often vastly different, broad, detailed. Sometimes warped, beautifully so.
I embrace vulnerability. I embrace sharing of myself and what I have learned. It’s a spiritual practice of sorts—when done carefully, intentionally, thoughtfully. And, what I know from having tiptoed into the public storytelling event realm the past six years, is that when we dare to share, we heal. And when we share we give an insider’s view of our healing. And, truly, quite often, others, too, can relate and sometimes heal. That’s an unintentional side effect. I’m doing this for me. A sort of a purge, cleanse and healing aloud. But, I now know it sometimes has bonus, sometimes somewhat magical, ripple effects for others.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in, breathe….
iPhone image: In January, I stepped out of my car at the park and on the edge of the pavement, I found this rock, seemingly just recently perfectly sliced into the shape of a heart.
Crashing Bottom, late April, 2020
©LeisaHammett.com
Originally published on the blog, this post tells of a deep dive into the blues week five of the pandemic. (And we thought five weeks was hard!) Ending a potential companionship in a season of isolation was magnified by living in the uncertainty of this situation in which we’d all found ourselves.
Read the published blog post here: Crashing Bottom: Grace in the Time of Corona
And then, it got quiet. The gig was up. The last man I dated minus three social distanced outdoor meet ups throughout the summer, online dating became somewhat unthinkable. Too weird. Unsafe. But, as per pandemic slapdown fate, it worked out for the better. I needed this time to go quiet and do further repair work to come out stronger, clearer and where I am now. Stay tuned. More on this subject to come. A hello to the future, 2021.
Happy holidays, All. Thank you for reading. Really: Thank You. —xxL
